Upon the shoulders of the pioneering 11-12 edition Venetian Connectionand the 12-13 Passione the "Hidden Lives of Venice on Video" aimed at creating one more omnibus of short documentary films - capturing un(dis)covered stories in and about the space that gave name to the contemporary notion of the Ghetto, the Venetian neighborhood called Ghetto.

After 5 weeks of joint online research that brought about a selection of topics and drafted production plans 18 students and 8 mentors meet in Venice Nov 24 - Dec 7, 2013 for 2 weeks of final synopsis clarification, scenario development, shooting and rough editing, to finalize the films for distribution in January. The screening was held on Friday December 6 at 1pm / Calle del Forno 1107, Ghetto Vecchio, Venezia.

In 2013 HILOVV received the Slovenian National award "Apple of Quality" ("Jabolko kakovosti") for the Best Intensive Programme. The award is given out bi-annually upon decision of an independent foreign jury, judging the whole intensive programme against criteria of relevance, result, management, sustainability as well as creativity and innovation.

2011

After two months of research-based script development about the "Hidden Live(r)s of Venice", on November 21 2011 students from three universities and several countries met in the floating city to produce 6 short documentaries about Venice, its interesting professions and personalities..., all under the mentorship of the renowned film director, professor Rajko Grlić.

Have a taste of our blogs from Venice (in Slovene):

HiLoVv Project Background

We will take a look at Venice from a different perspective, filter it through academic research and documentary film production. Students and mentors from three universities join to make 5 short documentaries about Venice, its people, their lives, the water...

The (Erasmus Intensive) programme under the title"Hidden Live(r)s of Veniceon Video"(HiLoVV) intends to revive the invisible and peripheral actors and narratives of a seemingly decaying urban tissue – Venice. By discovering the city’s inner life through academic research and audio-visual representation of urban spaces, and through creative interactions with its everyday inhabitants, teachers and students are going to develop specific skills and knowledge within the interdisciplinary combined thematic areas of audiovisual techniques and (multi)media production, historical and (urban) archaeology, including cultural as well as social studies.

Besides giving a unique and novel intercultural and interdisciplinary academic experience to the primary users, the secondary-user-centred aim of the project is to eventually offer a "social catharsis through video" to the immediate (academic and non-academic) audiences by featuring the 5 films (as major creative outputs) on site, regionally, and perhaps even globally. Contrasting the “hi” and the “low” research and production paradigms – somewhat mirroring the two disparate layers of Venice’s social reality – the specific pedagogical objective is to develop the key competence of a future film artist or video producer: to focus on small people as filters (the “liver” metaphor!) and carriers of “hidden” narratives, discovering Venice (repeatedly anew) – or indeed any other “historically marked” urban space – as a living urban tissue, reaching far beyond a mere historical scenery, a tourist landmark or a cultural business setting. In a broader project objective, the IP is to present a strong case of research-based media-production didactics, with a strong public impact and an innovative interdisciplinary outreach and strong ICT-based (blended) approach.

The primary target groupsof the programme include students, teachers and mentors, but also architects, urban sociologists, historians, conservators, and related (interdisciplinary oriented) scholars. Thesecondary target groups spread out onto all temporary as well as stationary urban inhabitants and “users” of Venice, as well as the regional and trans-regional (global) public, reached via the distribution of the produced films.The main activitiesof the programme revolve around the gradual (didactically dissected) process of filmic video-production, supported by analytic remote as well as on-site research (urban sociology, architecture and history) as well as including manifold interactions with local inhabitants and other “users” of the city. An important part of the project focuses around the dissemination activities covering on-site as well as trans-regional screenings and (exploitation-motivated) discussions, as well as fostering academic and non-academic (socially divergent) discourse on-site and on-line.

The main learning outcomes envision students to:(specifically)
- learn to research and produce in realistic and site-specific media production setting
- master film and video production in blended (remotely connected) settings
- develop site-specific preproduction, production and postproduction methods and work-styles in the realm of film and video production
- develop a critical and (post)modern sociological perspective on cultural heritage, architecture and urbanism(generally)
- develop interdisciplinary collaboration skills and team work ethics
- learn to creatively collaborate trans-disciplinary, trans-culturally and via ICT
- develop interdisciplinary competence in creative production settings
- develop intercultural and interdisciplinary discursive competence